Too Few are the Moments of Grace (a national lamentation)

PLEASE NOTE: I wrote this poem after wandering around the centres of Chester and Birkenhead recently and studying the faces of passers-by. The experience made me realise that many of the modern British (I’d say a big majority) look utterly beaten, poor in spirit, shabbily dressed, and frankly, mentally ill. Quite what is happening to my beloved country, I’m not sure, but it is breaking my heart. Here’s the poem …

Too few now are the moments of grace;
When divine sparks light up each face
And it’s briefly glorious in this place,
Blessed from above.

Too many now are the days of distain
When nothing registers but pain
And millions dream of moving to Spain.

Still, still, still, the bitterest pill…
We stay
In Britain;
But not as we knew it…

And it’s not looking good,
No, it’s not looking good.
It’s bad ass bad all the way,
It’s a beautiful country gone crazily astray;
Gone mouldering, smouldering ashtray;
Gone stub end, dead end, pig-penned;
Utterly gutterly, rancidly butterly, tits up;

We’re sadder than sad, medievaly mad.
We’re at the end of our culture.
It’s been a long time coming;
But it’s near,
Almost here,
The death of Britain…

Oh, what to do with the busted nation
That gave the world its greatest empire?
Well I, well I, well I …
Gulp in shame and hold back the tears.

Well I …well I … Weller saw it coming.
‘Oh Heavenly Thing, please cleanse our soul,
We’ve seen all on offer and we’re not impressed at all’.

Oh Heavenly Thing is there owt you can do?
Are we to the world, as Steven Patrick predicted,
‘The last truly British people you will ever know?’

Swirl those Celtic pipes, lads.
We may as well go down in glory.

Love’s Lost Courage

I want to be brave
But never was very good at that.
Grrrrr! See, no-one is frightened
Or impressed.

And now the bad days are here,
Cruel times in a beautiful country.
Even my heartbeats feel like goodbyes,
And it comes as no surprise
To see me cower, the ultimate faint-heart,
Expecting, almost willing, my love to depart.

Love has been an infrequent visitor
To the shores of Lake Me.
But She came and She captured me
Amid the lost glory of New Brighton.

And I willingly surrendered.
I wanted dependence on her
After battling alone
On London’s mean streets,
Accepting the battering of serial defeats,
Saved only by poetry and poetic stances
And red-wined fuelled unstable dances,
In Hackney, Hoxton the Angel and Shoreditch;
Never knowing why, how, whom or which.

With love, with Her, came stability
And courage filtered into my heart.
But I still don’t feel brave.
I feel this might not last.
I’m hard work,
And destined to
Return to the past:
Loveless, a failure,
A coward.

Eden Restored – a poem

Come reckless banks
And without thanks
Pull down capitalism
With no need for socialism
Or terrorism

Come friendly bomb
And destroy dot com
Because in truth in every nation
There’s just too much information

Come acid rain
Spoil each parade
Of humanity’s sulphuric pride
In deadened realms of countryside

Come global warming
And without warning
Create the swamp wherein we’ll dwell
Enduring this, our home-made hell

Come visitors from afar
Guided by an unknown star
And with new ways not understood
Erase the bad, restore what’s good.

Come future times
When Eden’s climes
Are returned to glory by able hands
That honed their skills in alien lands.

(Copyright 2008 – All rights reserved by Steve Regan. No reproduction without permission of the author.)

Friendship at first sight

WELL, I hope you and yours had a good Valentine’s Day and evening.

And if you are single, then I hope you weren’t too irritated by all the slushiness, sentimentality and the cheesy concentration on couples shown by restaurants and shops. 

It is good to talk of love, and to write about it too. The subject has, after all, enthralled poets and philosophers since the earliest days of humanity.

I wrote a poem for my beloved ‘Posh Boots’ for Valentine’s Day and placed it in a beautiful reproduction Art Deco frame as a present for her.

She loved it, of course. Who wouldn’t be delighted to have a poem written especially for you?

And she deserves to have such verses written for her. We love each other; it’s as simple and as complicated as that.

But don’t worry, I am not going to replicate my poem for ‘Posh Boots’ here; it’s too personal, though I might read it at the next Bards of New Brighton meeting (9 March, Magazine pub, New Brighton, starting 8pm)!

Today, in any case, I don’t intend to linger on the subject of love because, for many people in this era of record numbers of single people, love is absent … or painful.

Hardly any of us find an ideal partner that we truly love for the full run of a life-long relationship.

Some of us go for years without a partner, without love, and then find it quite late in life.

Others find love, enjoy it for a few years, and then lose it.

Welcome to life in our fallen world; it was never meant to be easy.

But today, I want to focus on friendship rather more than what we normally understand as love.

Love of the emotional, sexual variety is intense and, at times, all-consuming.  Friendship is cooler yet every bit as important and is, actually, itself a form of love.

Who amongst us hasn’t told our friends that we love them?

Never mind that we might be p***ed as farts at the time. In Vino Veritas – in wine there is truth.

There is a fascinating poem by Robert Graves called “Friendship at First Sight”. That title raises the possibility of friendships that are formed magically at the first meeting or sight of someone.

Here’s what Graves wrote …

‘Love at first sight,’ some say, misnaming

        Discovery of twinned helplessness

        Against the huge tug of procreation.

         But friendship at first sight? This also

        Catches fiercely at the surprised heart

        So that the cheek blanches and then blushes.

Now, I think it is great, absolutely thrilling, to think that love at first sight happens, as many people who have experienced it will attest.

But I think it equally stunning that friendship at first sight can occur.

I’ve not had the privilege of experiencing love at first sight. Love needs a chance to grow … in my heart anyway.

But I think I have, on several occasions throughout my life, experienced friendship at first sight.

And when I think of those instances, though they be many years apart from each other, I know bonds were made that will probably last a lifetime.

How comforting it is to know, when the world is undergoing massive changes and considerable distress that something as brilliant and valuable as friendship at first sight can exist. It makes you feel good about being human.

And for all the singletons around in this post-Valentine’s Day period, don’t forget that love, while it rarely comes at first sight, is still in plentiful supply.

It may well be just around the corner for you. I hope it is.

Keep the faith,

Steve.

 

 

Luvvie poet in despair

WHAT a calamitous end to our Bards of New Brighton poetry session at the Magazine pub on Monday night!
I left at about half past eleven, full of Rioja, to carry the Bards’ golden lectern to my car, which had been driven over by Posh Boots to pick me up and take me home.
The trouble is, before leaving, I neglected to pick up the book that contains my poems, all of them, every one I’ve ever written.
I clambered into the car, not noticing anything was missing, and off we motored … until the entirely sober Posh Boots interjected: “Hey! Where’s your book, your poetry stuff and the posters for the Bards?”
“Errr, hic!…errr, I ….dunno …hic!”
We were nearly home by then but we duly turned around and drove back to the Mags, hoping to retrieve the precious documents. Needless to say, hardly any of my poems are backed up.
Alas, the barmaid there said she’d given my poetry bundle to a “lady with blonde curly hair” for safe keeping.
I thought she must have meant our friend Greta, who had attended the last half hour of the Bards and had been intending to carry on supping later in Hell’s Waiting Room with her husband Commuting Mitch. Well, it was her birthday…
So off we drove to HWR only to be informed that the poetry book and other documents had definitely not been collected by Greta after all.
I went into emotional frenzy at that point… “My poems, my life’s work … gorn! All of it lost in some hazy, careless alehouse incident. Oh, woe is me, woe is me!”
Well, you can imagine the scene …
That I was so upset didn’t seem to register with anyone present – apart from my beloved Posh Boots. Everyone else (Dr Gyggle, Eamonn Lairyshirts etc.) just sat around tittering about the poor tortured poet in their midst.
Commuting Mitch seemed to find my plight especially amusing – so I called him a Very Rude Name.
And I needed another large red to settle my nerves!
In truth I was doubly tormented about the loss because among the poetry stuff was a sheaf of drama scripts given to be by Wallasey Operatic Society – and I had to get them back urgently in order to learn them off my heart.
You see, I am due, along with some other drama newbies, to give a public performance of the scripted material at the Harrison Hall, Wallasey Village, later this week.
Anyway, it turns out that the valuable paperwork had in fact been given to a certain Scubadiver – another blonde lady who had attended the Bards on Monday night for the first time, along with some of her friends, including a talented poet called Dave.
Thankfully, she’d got my email address from a print-off contained in the file I’d left behind in the pub and so was able to alert me that she had everything safe and could return it to me.
And by this evening, Tuesday 10 March, Posh Boots had duly retrieved from Scubadiva – for my personal use and the great benefit of global art – my lost poetry and copies of all my luvvy dialogue.
I shall be lighting a candle in front of a statue of Our Lady and saying some Hail Mary’s in thanks for the safe deliverance of my innermost creativity in paper form… if I can find a Catholic church left open on the Wirral.
And thanks too to Scubadiver. I hope she and her friends will come to the Bards again.